


everything burns anyway

by orphan_account



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Blood and Injury, Dissociation, F/M, How Do I Tag, Memory Loss, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-08-14
Updated: 2014-08-14
Packaged: 2018-02-13 01:43:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,070
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2132382
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Natasha get's an unexpected visit from a bloody, almost stranger in the middle of the night.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is more of a character study than anything else. A character study that is not going in the direction I originally planned when I started writing this at 3 in the morning, anyway here's the first chapter.

He shows up at her apartment in the middle of the night. At first she pulls the door open in anger because who would _dare_ bother her at this time. But when she sees him, it catches her off guard, because he’s leaning against the wall, barely standing, barely _breathing_. His face is swollen and bloodied and the way he holds his right arm against his chest she knows he’s broken something, knows he’s broken lots of things. But he just stands there, blending with the shadows without even trying, with his head propped up against the stone so that he can raise his chin to look her in the eye with a defiance that burns in his stare.

She doesn’t say anything, just stands aside and opens the door completely so that he lurches in. After she closes the door behind him they stand at either end of the narrow hallway just staring each other down, and he shouldn’t be able to stand never mind hold himself in such a way that is almost leering as if just in the way he stands he’s daring her to make a move, because he may be just about clinging on to life but he’s still got enough fight in him to do her some damage and she sees all this but she doesn’t plan on fighting unless she has to.

She edges forward, holding her hands up so that he can see them. He can sense her fear in every step she takes, it’s hidden and controlled but it’s in her breathing and the tensing of her muscles and he can’t think about anything but the pain burning its way through his body. His breathing is ragged and he’s trying to keep himself standing but it’s too much for him to take so she catches him just as he begins to collapse and throws his left arm over her shoulder to support him. The metal digs into her shoulder and where it touches her skin shivers echo through her body but there’s not much she can do about it. With his weight supported on her shoulder she drags him into her kitchen and just about drops him on the table before turning to the cabinets for alcohol and medical supplies. When she turns back to him he’s managed to pull his left arm out of the heavy leather jacket he’s wearing, she pushes him back so that he’s lying flat on the table and carefully works his right arm free. His t-shirt is clotted with blood so she takes a pair of scissors and cuts it open to expose the damage. His entire torso is covered in cuts and it make her wonder how the jacket isn’t ripped to shreds and then that he mustn’t of been wearing it when he was injured but then how did he get the jacket on with his injuries and she thinks about all this because there’s so much blood and if she takes a minute to consider what she’s doing she would realise how dumb and naive she’s being so she doesn’t think about it, she just works and hopes for the best. The alcohol causes him to writhe in pain but she keeps working; stitching and taping and the blood is covering her hands but not for the reasons it usually is because now she’s fixing not destroying and she’s fixing him.

He tries to hold still while she stitches but there’s something about the pain that is so sharp that he feels it in every fibre of his being and part of him appreciates it because usually the agony is clouded by something in his mind so even when it burns it’s foggy and registers as secondary but now he can’t register anything but the pain and for the first time in a long time he feels alive.  He watches her as she works. It’s like he’s finally seeing the world in perfect clarity and the pain and her presence are so crisp that they feel like the most beautiful things he’s ever experienced which strikes him as odd – that pain could be beautiful, but it just is. She cleans his wounds one by one and wraps the deepest in heavy gauze and carefully ties a sling for his swollen right arm, it probably needs plastering but they would need to go to a hospital for that.

Once she’s completely finished he sits up on the edge of the table and for a minute they do nothing but watch each other, calculating the threat level and their next moves. After the minute he utters a single syllable thanks with as about as much emotion you might offer a stranger who held a door open for you, her reply is simple.

“You can sleep on the couch.” And with that she stalks out of the dim kitchen and into her bedroom, so no more words are passed between them.   

 

* * *

 

 

She washes the blood off her hands before she goes to bed, and it’s not the first time she’s seen scarlet tainted water running down the plug but it holds her attention anyway. She watches the red run from her fingers and swirl in the basin, she watches the water from the tap wash the red away and she watches herself in the mirror as she wipes away the red on her cheek that she must have smudged when pushing her hair out of her face and she contemplates that her whole life is about watching for red, which makes her snort at herself because now is not the time for all that philosophical crap she needs to figure out what to do next. She has just granted a trained assassin, with over a dozen known kills, who’s wanted by practically every government agency in the states –and god knows where else- permission to sleep on her couch, she probably should have thought the whole thing through when he was bleeding out on her table but she didn’t have the luxury of hesitation at the time so now she’s just going to have to wing it and hope for the best. Funny how often her life turns out like that.

In the kitchen he cleans the mess up for her. He doesn’t even think about it he just does, ignoring the pain movement causes. his body working on auto-pilot while his mind works through all the details of the night. He can’t remember how he got hurt, can’t even remember deciding to come to her apartment or how he knew where she was. He remembers breakfast, the crummy diner and the smiley waitress that asked a lot of questions that he answered with a lot of lies, he remembers paying and leaving and then it’s like there’s a gap in the recording because next thing he remembers is standing on the concrete step and the door being opened and there she is. He remembers her name. Natasha Romanoff. Natalia Romanova. He repeats it over and over in his head and he tries to attach information to her name and her face, he knows she was there with the man on the bridge - who he knows is named Steve but the name causes a tightness in his gut and bile in his throat so he doesn’t think about the man on the bridge - but there’s something else in his memory that he can’t reach and he knows he’s missing something, something about her, something surrounded by red.

She doesn’t sleep, she knows better than that. It would be foolish and naive to trust the stranger -she might know his life and they may have fought on the bridge but he's still a stranger because she may know him but she doesn't know who he is- she’s invited into her home so she silently reorganises her room to keep herself awake and come up with a plan. There isn’t much of a plan; just don’t let him kill her and phone Steve in the morning, Steve will know what to do, he can deal with him. But then there are the questions that she needs answering, how did he find her? Why did he find her? If he can find her who else can? Who else does she need to worry about?

After he has cleaned up the kitchen he collapses on the small leather couch. His body still aches and his thoughts are still swimming but he’s so exhausted that it isn’t long before he’s being tugged into the comfort of sleep. He’s slept so little recently and the couch is so comfortable and sleep seems so warm that it begins to wash over him in seconds, the darkness engulfs him and he welcomes the emptiness but just as he is being pulled into a deeper state of unconscious his mind begins to burn. The world goes fuzzy again for a moment and then becomes all too clear and he is surrounded by a memory of death and destruction and he wishes he could tell himself that it’s just a nightmare but he’s reliving the sounds of screams and he can feel the blood on his hands and the smoke in his throat and he knows the smell of burning flesh while he watches the fear blazing in dying eyes.


	2. Chapter 2

She manages to stay awake until morning and watches the sunrise through a crack in her curtains as the sky becomes lit up with dazzling shades of orange and red which makes her think of that rhyme about shepherds and warnings and she might take it as a sign only she doesn’t buy into all that superstitious crap because it doesn’t matter what the colour of the sky is, the day can bring anything and today anything it will bring. She dresses choosing clothing that is easy to move in and offers some protection while arming herself with discreetly concealed blades before stalking out of her room with a t-shirt and a pair of trousers that she hopes are her “guest’s” size. Expecting to be greeted with a blood stained kitchen, to her surprise she is met by the smell of ammonia and wiped down surfaces and she doesn’t know what to think about the wounded, shirtless assassin who apparently cleans up after himself that is curled up on her couch but it’s not exactly one of those things that you can ignore. She pours a glass of water and places it on the coffee table beside him with the clothes and a box of painkillers. His eyes are closed but his eyelids are flickering rapidly so she knows that whatever he’s dreaming about it’s not pretty and the shadows under his eyes and the particular tightness in his muscles suggest that he hasn’t slept well so she’s debating whether to let him sleep or kick him awake when his eyes flick open so she doesn’t have to decide. He stares at her unblinking and there’s something in his face, something about him that’s not the same as last night and she doesn’t know how to explain but it just seems like he’s less _there_ and she doesn’t know what to make of it and doesn’t exactly care enough to think about it too hard she just wants him gone so she crosses her arms and tells him:

“I’m going to call Steve.” And leaves.

After the flashback he struggles to sleep and when he does he is plagued by images of the dead and dying but eventually morning comes and she’s standing above him but the crispness of her is gone and her presence is cloudy so that when she speaks he’s hardly concentrating enough to catch her words, but fortunately or unfortunately – he can’t quite decide which- he does, and then she’s leaving as though she can’t make a statement without turning on her heel directly after. He thinks maybe she’s trying to control whatever situation this is, or maybe she’s afraid of the conversation her statement could bring or maybe she’s just too disgusted to stay in a room with him any longer than she has too and he finds himself thinking that actually he doesn’t really care which. He sits up, wincing at the pain the movement brings because his head hurts, well everything hurts and he pulls on the t-shirt and takes a couple of aspirin while trying to figure out he feels about facing what he’s been running from since the he pulled that man out of the water, but his heads still hurts so he takes another aspirin because really all he wants is to sleep. 

 

* * *

 

Steve and Sam show up just over an hour later, and Sam’s carrying a bag of takeaway breakfast at Nat’s request because she knows he needs to eat but she absolutely refuses to cook for him, so after she’s taken out her portion she throws the bag in his direction while Steve stands in the doorway in mild disbelief and his voice cracks but he just about manages a “hey Buck”, but Steve’s just a stranger to him, the man on the bridge, so “Buck” pulls out his breakfast and gives him the side eye because he doesn’t know what else to do, doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do. Then Nat, Sam and Steve are huddled in the kitchen and he knows they’re talking about but he’s not concentrating enough to listen properly so just catches snippets,

“No way he can’t stay here.”

“Nat we don’t really have a choice.”

“I hate to say it but he’s right, There’s god knows who out there looking for him, it would be a risk to move him and besides, there’s nowhere else for him to go.”

He doesn’t really process what he’s hearing it just echoes around his brain without settling while he stares at a spot on the wall. Their voices get louder with annoyance and then stop and Steve’s coming over to him and he doesn’t know why but he’s overcome with a white hot rage, filled with anger for this stranger who looks at him like he knows him, like he’s expecting something from him so when Steve starts talking to him in a gentle voice like he’s a kicked puppy he’s seeing too much red to hear what he’s saying, to hear him say that he will have to stay here a while but they’ll be back soon, and Sam and Nat are in the background and he can hear _them_. Hear the last sentences of their conversation that fuel his anger because it’s a question he can’t answer himself, but he should be able to. He should know his own intentions.

“Why did he come to you anyway?”

“Hell if I know.”

 

* * *

 

 Steve and Sam are gone with the promise of return and Natasha is in another room and he’s deciding what he’s going to do because she doesn’t want him here and he doesn’t know why he wanted to be here in the first place. So he snatches up his clothes and rummages around the cabinets for a carrier bag to shove them into. He’s halfway to the door when he hears her.

“Where you going?” She says it calmly but he’s suddenly got the feeling she’s not going to be so quick to let him leave and he doesn’t want to look at her in case she’s clear again because he knows he will want to stay so he just shrugs and takes another step, and she must be closer than he realised because she’s side stepping him and then they’re facing each other in a matter of seconds.

“That’s probably a bad idea.” She says it with a smile on her face but a tightness in her eyes  that's intended. If she wanted to appear friendly she could do so easily but friendly ‘s not the route she’s taking so for the second in time in just over 12 hour they find themselves facing each other down in her narrow hallway. The determination of survival is gone from face and has been replaced with detachment that wasn’t there yesterday. He doen’t have time to play this game he just wants to get away, so he takes another step and he realises all too late that it's not a game she’s playing.

 She steps behind him as he steps forward and reaches around his neck so that her knife is pressed against his throat, and with her free hand she grabs a fistful of his hair and jerks his head up to the ceiling because she may not have wanted any part of this to begin with but she’s involved now, and she’s beginning to learn that there can be more to life – her life – than survival and maybe he can learn the same. So she talks to him, she tells him with anger on her tongue and bitterness in her words about guilt, about how it doesn’t go away no matter how far you run, that you can spend your whole life running and hiding in shadows but then that life doesn’t really amount to much. She tells him that he can walk out that door but she’s going to have no choice but to alert some authority and then he’ll spend his whole life locked away from the world or be killed as what it has let him become. She tells him all this, she whispers it in his ear until he stops struggling because he’s not strong enough to fight her right now and her words make more sense than he might be willing to admit, then his body is jerking from her suddenly letting him go and he’s left alone in the hallway staring at the door. He stares at that door for a long time. That door he walked in and now he can’t walk out of without changing everything for good, maybe everything changed for good when he walked in it, maybe there’s no running away from this.

When he leaves the hallway and throws the bag back onto the couch she doesn’t say anything, no eyebrow raise, no movement to acknowledge the “conversation” they just had and he thinks it doesn’t matter because she may never want to talk about what she said as long she lives but he’s never going to forget it. It’s burned into his memory.


End file.
